Field of Disclosure
Certain embodiments of the invention relate to communication networks. More specifically, certain embodiments of the invention relate to methods and systems for correlating alarms in a communication network.
Background
Modern communications carriers operate local, regional, and nationwide networks to provide connectivity to customers. These networks are built with a variety of equipment to perform various tasks, and such equipment may be manufactured by multiple vendors. Each piece of equipment, referred herein as a network element, may be complex enough to handle hundreds or thousands of simultaneous connections, and different pieces of equipment may be widely dispersed across a region. Wireless base stations, for example, are geographically distributed across a city to optimize coverage and efficiency. Customer expectations of network availability, given such distribution, complexity, and heterogeneity of equipment, mandates fast detection and accurate diagnosis of equipment problems that may arise.
To aid in the detection and diagnosis of problems, network equipment often generates alarms for sub-components within the system. For example, a failing port in a router may trigger an alarm. Even non-communications equipment such as cooling fans can generate alarms. Any physical or logical component associated with a network that generates or triggers alarms in the network is referred herein as a network object.
Alarms can be useful tools for detecting and diagnosing network problems, but they may not always indicate a failure in the network object generating the alarm. Specifically, a failure in one network object may generate an alarm from the failing element and cause the generation of nearly simultaneous alarms from several other elements that depend on the failing element. When a failure in a single network object causes a number of associated alarms, the operator is forced to sift through the alarms and perform extraneous diagnostics simply to determine where the true source of failure is. The problem is further compounded in networks with potentially millions of alarm-generating network objects manufactured by multiple vendors with different alarm protocols and formats.